He was already up and moving like a smooth shot of pure whiskey or a bullet aimed straight for her. And she had the dazed thought that no man who looked that solid, packed sleek with hard muscle and holy hell in his deep blue gaze, should be capable of moving that way, so swift and so sure.

Like the predator he was.

Sophie didn’t even realize she was up on her own feet and backing away fast, but not fast enough, until her back hit the wall and Ajax kept right on coming.

He crowded into her. The stripper heels she wore put them eye to eye, and that wasn’t helpful. It made her feel scraped out inside, hot and hollow. There was nowhere to hide and he was in her face and still coming. He was still smiling at her, that crook of his mouth that promised sheer mayhem, and then he was all over her.

She could feel the heat of the thick Louisiana day coming off him, or maybe that was just him, big and male and ferocious in a white T-shirt and beat-up jeans that he wore entirely too well, shitkicker boots on his feet, and the gleam of the chain connecting his wallet to his pants. The wall was hard against her naked back and he was much harder in front of her, using his vast, tough chest to pin her in place, crushing himself against her tasseled breasts, enough to get her attention if not quite hard enough to hurt.

And that which didn’t hurt her made her…needy.

It made her imagine what it would be like to be beneath this man, crushed down hard against a bed and his magnificent body stretched out on top of her without the irritation of those pasties or his T-shirt in her way, the way she’d dreamed more than once when she’d been a teenager.

When she’d been a very young, very foolish girl who couldn’t tell the difference between a wolf and a warning.

Ajax pushed up farther into her, into her space and against her body. He smelled like soap and sun and something far darker, far earthier, that teased over her skin like a whisper. Like sex. His heavy shoulders blocked out the whole of Bourbon Street in the distance behind him, and he slapped one of those granite hands of his, with tattoos over his knuckles and chunky-ass rings that could take out teeth with a single punch, against the wall entirely too close to her head.

He put his other hand on her throat.

Not quite her throat, she amended a blistering moment later. Not that it made much difference. He put his thumb on her right collarbone and his index finger burned like a brand along the left, and he didn’t squeeze, he didn’t press down, though he could have. They both knew he could have.

And there was no hiding the mad percussion of her pulse from him then, that close. That bared to him.

There was no hiding anything at all.

Like that desperate, delirious heat that swept over her, erupting from a dark melting knot of something like fire low in her belly. It almost took her from her feet as it roared through her, making her knees feel weak and her breasts so heavy she felt a tug as the adhesive on the back of her pasties fought her reaction. Worse, a betraying flush swept over her, lighting her up and making her catch her breath against it, red and obvious.

She shoved at him and he grunted, but he didn’t move by so much as the tiniest little inch, and she hated that there was a part of her that thrilled to that. To the evidence that this man moved where and when he wanted to, or not at all.

This close, she could see too much. Entirely too much. The years hadn’t been particularly kind to Ajax, but then, he’d started off far too pretty for his own good. She remembered him in his feral early twenties, bright and blond and so stunning that tourists had followed him around the French Quarter like they thought he was a harmless wolf cub set loose from his pack, as if that hard smile of his was merely teeth and there was something more than violence in his sweet blue eyes.

I’m so glad you came back from Afghanistan in one piece, she’d heard one of the besotted tourists giggle at him once upon a very late night, over at one of the Priory tables with her too-short denim skirt already shoved out of his way.

And Ajax had responded, that angelic face of his never quite as hard as those eyes, No one comes back in one piece, bitch. With his hands high on her thighs and murder in his tone. They just come home.

His face was leaner now. Tougher. Less angel, more warrior. This Ajax wore his danger and his power right there on his face, in the lines that made his eyes look bluer, in the beard that made him look like the walking calamity he was, and no one would mistake this man for anything but that, blue eyes or not. He was lethal. And Sophie couldn’t help but think that he was far more beautiful for it, God help her. A battered, dark gold, finely honed machine of a man, and he was grinning at her like he already had her pants at her knees and her ass over the nearest table.

No small part of her wished he did.

And she was fucked, because once that image was in her head, she couldn’t think of anything else—and she was positive he could read it right there on her face.

“You better tell your girl to put down that phone,” he said softly, so softly and so close that Sophie had to blink to make sense of it, so entranced was she by that mouth of his. “If the police show up in the middle of my homecoming party I might lose my sense of humor.”

“I’m fine, Danielle,” she called, and the bartender behind them froze, her cellphone clenched tight in her hand. “Sean here is just an old friend of my father’s.”

“You don’t have any idea when to quit, do you?”

“Because you, of course, are the model of restraint.”

That dangerous curve of his mouth tightened, and so did everything inside of her. “I’m not the mouthy piece of ass pinned up against the back of a bar with a golden opportunity to rethink my attitude. If I were you, I’d take it.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

Ajax studied her. “Then you’re as dumb as you act. Bad combination, babe. Especially in this neighborhood.”

“Should I interpret that as concern for my well-being?” she asked, her voice as acidic as it was sweet. “It’s hard to tell while you’re choking me.”

A different sort of grin lit his face then, changing that look in his eyes and then dancing all over her. He shifted, sliding that big, hard hand of his up over her chin and then dragging his thumb over her lower lip, slowly. The grin drained from his face as he watched and he looked…hungry. Needy. Then he tested her teeth on the way back with the pad of that big thumb of his, and the urge to close her lips around him was so intense, so overwhelming, she lost her train of thought.

There was only Ajax, big and threatening and so beautiful it was making her shake.

He did it again. And it was the way he did it. It was pure sex in a simple little scrape of his thumb on her lip, then against her teeth, and it was dirty as all fuck.

Ajax lifted his gaze to hers then, and his blue eyes had gone hot. It shuddered through her, intense and heavy. A threat, she told herself. Dark and hard and life altering. A distinct and deliberate threat.

But she was far more worried it was a promise.

“Let me go,” she said, shocked to hear her own voice had gone so quiet. So wispy and girly, not like her at all.

“What’s that? No insane attitude this time from the half-naked chick in the dive bar? No throwing a name I hate in my face for good measure? You’re slipping, babe.”

And a wise woman would have said whatever needed to be said. A wise woman would have ceded the battle to win the war. Anything to get his hands off her before she begged him to really, truly use them instead.

But Sophie was her father’s daughter, through and through.

“Did you not understand me?” she asked, fake sweet and entirely too belligerent for a man like this one, who likely viewed physical attacks as quiet conversations and whole wars as backyard barbecues with friends. His hand was on her chin, he was pushed up against her, and still she pushed back. With her hands and her chest and her chin, though it did absolutely nothing to dislodge him. She’d known it wouldn’t. “Don’t worry, I speak biker. I just pretend I’ve been hit in the head by a truck and use very. Small. Words.”